ROOTS OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY WHY STUDY HISTORICAL ROOTS

• Yesterday’s research leads to today’s questions--debates from the earliest times set the stage for today’s research.

• Psychology has been through several paradigm shifts: examining previous paradigms allows us to see the benefits and failings of the past paradigms and the current cognitive paradigm.

  PHILOSOPHICAL ROOTS

• Before psychology there was philosophy and the big picture of the philosophical roots of all psychology in general is a picture of
• (1) empiricism--all knowledge is derived from experience, and of
• (2) associationism--knowledge proceeds by associating together sensory impressions.

•      A.) Plato
• Plato was one of the first early philosophers to consider human thinking.
• Plato conceptualized mind like a block of wax, upon which perceptions and ideas make an impression.
• While the impression of an idea remains, we can remember it.

•      B.) Aristotle
• Aristotle (c. 350 B.C.) -- believed all learning was determined by association.
• Governed by:
• contiguity (more closely together in space or time two items occur, the more likely will the thought of one item lead to the thought of the other),
• similarity (the thought of one concept often leads to the thought of similar concepts),
• contrast (the thought of one concept often leads to the thought of its opposite).
• Historical Importance: first attempt at scientific account of the mind.
• Contemporary Importance: beginning of nature/nurture debate.

•       C.) Rene Descartes (1596-1650): nativist--we are born with innate ideas and abilities. Cartesian (mind/body) Dualism - divided behavior in 2 classes:
• 1.) involuntary (body behavior): mechanical behavior in response to external stimuli: reflex arc - A stimulus is transmitted to the brain by a nerve (a hollow tube containing 'animal spirits').
• 2.) voluntary (mind behavior): behavior governed by soul or mind--only humans are capable of and distinguishes man from beast. Actions of the mind governed by reason, not by physical laws.

•      D.) The Empiricists: British philosophers of the 17th century:
• Typified by Locke (1690): All knowledge acquired through experience--tabula rasa--we are born with a blank slate onto which is written all of our experiences.
• Simple ideas (which come from sense impressions) combine to form more complex ones by association.
• Introduced introspection as a method to study ideas.

•      E.) Immanuel Kant

• Kant’s Philosophy: Bridged the gap between Empiricism and Descartes’ rationalism.
• Suggested that what we know depends on the interaction of who we are along with what we experience--knowledge is the product of new information interacting with previous information.

•      F.) British philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries (Berkeley, Hume & Hartley, Mill & Brown)--Associationists:
• Culminated in Laws of Association--analogous but separate psychical and physical processes to account for ideas becoming associated with one another.
• 2 important Principles of Associationism
• Contiguity: two things become associated if they can occur together in time and space;
• Repetition: must occur to build associations
• Other factors were also thought to influence the formation of associations:
• intensity of the sensations,
• recency of their pairing,
• frequency of their pairing,
• number of associations in which the sensations to be associated are also involved,
• similarity of the association to be formed to other, past associations
• Associationism affected early psychologists because many were schooled as philosophers in the 19th century.

•      G.) Opposition to Associationism
• Ideas of association were very attractive to early psychologists and continue to be applied. Problem: in the 1800's there were no guidelines for the measurement or assessment of associations.
• The problem with ambiguity of measurement led to the eventual demise of associationist approaches to cognition.
• There was also disagreement with the notion of the person as a passive organism bombarded by sensations--rather than as an active information gatherer.
• This led to the currently predominant view of cognitive psychology which emphasizes thinking as multi-faceted, composed of several, distinct processes and structures, and not as a unitary associationist function.

STRUCTURALISM

• Wundt opened the first laboratory in psychology in 1879 which studied "the science of mind".
• Goal was to identify the simplest essential units of mind, like the periodic table did for chemistry. Used introspection to determine HOW the mind works.

INTROSPECTION

• At the turn of the century both the German and American academies employed introspection as their primary research method.
• Researchers would sit around together and compare their inner insights into what was going on when they were thinking, perceiving, sensing, attending, remembering, etc.
• Unfortunately, different individuals perceived different things somewhat differently.
• For example, if you ask a person to lift two weights, it is fairly easy to determine which is the heavier of the two weights as long as they are very different in weight; however, if the two weights are fairly close together it is common for different individuals to be split on which is the heavier of the two.
• This was not a bad approach, and one which still has limited usefulness especially as a point of departure; however, there was no way to objectively quantify such researches.
• Because of situations in which individual differences could not be accounted for, there arose a need for a more scientific approach, and in fact, the pendulum swung to the other extreme.

FUNCTIONALISM

• William James (‘father’ of American psychology) focused on WHY the mind works. Function was related to the way the mind works the way it does.
• Drew heavily on Darwinian evolutionary theory and real-life applications.
• Was more experimental than introspective, although did little experimental work himself.

BEHAVIORISM

• Behaviorism dominated psychology from the ‘20's to ‘50's. Behaviorism, S-R psychology, was the strict study of behavior--only objective and observable phenomena were ‘proper’ for study.
• "Behaviors" such as thinking and remember-ing were not proper because they were inferred, not directly observed--mind as a whole had no direct role to play in behaviorism.
• Emphasis shifted to the extreme of operational definitions of behaviors, tied to highly specific operations or observations.
• Skinner maintained that all behavior is nothing more, nothing less than a series of responses to reinforcers (rewards or punishments) in the external environment.
• Behaviorism, because of its extreme position, was also fated to fall into disfavor, although, again, there are elements which remain useful.
• Behaviorism's greatest pitfalls lay in explaining complex behaviors, such as speech, where the notion of continuous S-R connections fails to account for the color and originality of spoken language.
• By ignoring the inner environment, strict behaviorism lead to its own demise. Simple introspection will lead to the inevitable conclusion that we are thinking, feeling beings without requiring any outside stimulation to set our thoughts and feelings in motion.

DOWNFALL OF BEHAVIORISM

• 1927: Kohler shows problem-solving often involves "insight"
• 1932: Tolman demonstrates learning without reinforcement
• 1953: computers and communcation technology emerge.
• 1957: Chomsky shows language acquisition is too complex for a simple S-R explanation.
• 1962: Piaget shows cognitive development occurs in sudden, qualitative shifts.

THE GESTALT TRADITION

• The word Gestalt in German means form or configuration.
• The Gestalt tradition, which originated in Germany as a reaction to behaviorism in the United States, relied on sensory and perceptual processing to explain or offer insight into other mental processes.
• The information processing approach to cognitive psychology has relied to a great extent on Gestalt teachings to understand the basic processes of pattern recognition--critical to understand all subsequent information processing.
• The Gestalt tradition also greatly influenced current thinking on problem solving behavior, particularly when we look at the process of insight and of trial and error.

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

• Several independent, co-occurring events around the early ‘50's led to the decreased popularity of behaviorism and subsequent rise of cognitive psychology, especially information processing.
• 1st was dissatisfaction with and inability of behaviorism to explain higher cognitive functions.
• 2nd was the rise of technology which influenced several young sciences, especially communication engineering and verbal learning.
• 3rd was the young science of computer science--analogy between human mind and computer--limited working memory and theoretically infinite memory storage system; seen to interact to solve problems, make decisions, recognize and respond to external (environmental) stimuli. Focused on the mind as a symbol operating system.
• Cognitive psychology came to be based on the notion that all information processing takes time, and that time is taken up with a series of processing stages, or steps, being performed on the information.
• Measurement of reaction time became very important--if you measure how long a response takes, and then change the response requirement in some way, you can determine the time required to process the changed piece of information.
• For example, by degrading a stimulus we can determine how long it takes to perceive that degraded stimulus compared to a clear stimulus.

• Most important, the information processing framework brought the mind back to the forefront of psychological research and offered a host of exciting questions to be asked, along with a sound experimental methodology for answering these questions.

COGNITIVE SCIENCE

• Cognitive science is considered to be the epitome of an interdisciplinary approach, with cognitive psychology one of its contributing disciplines.
• It is more concerned with purely mathematical and biological questions being asked related to thinking. For example, artificial intelligence is more often seen to come under the purview of cognitive science, relying more heavily on mathematics and computer science.
• The study of the neuroanatomical and neurophy-siological events which occur during remembering is considered under cognitive science, but cognitive psychology is more interested in the external manifestations of memory.
• Thus, the distinctions are fine, and often cognitive psychology and cognitive science overlap.

  CONNECTIONISM: NEURAL NET-WORK MODELS, OR PARALLEL DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING - PDP

• We may be leaving primary reliance on information processing models of cognition and shifting to a reliance on connectionist models of cognition.
• The analogy for connectionism is the human brain--the mind is subserved by the highly complex and interconnected network of neurons rather than by a simple series of memory stores which at some point interact in the working memory stage.
• PDP models suggest that memory and information processing occur in the connections themselves, and not in particular storage locations.
• In addition, it is obvious that the serial processing model of traditional serial computer models cannot account for the wealth of parallel processing which goes on in the brain.